


i walked in a desert

by diana_hawthorne (stsgirlie)



Category: Cracks (2009)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-20
Updated: 2013-10-20
Packaged: 2017-12-29 22:06:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,070
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1010667
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stsgirlie/pseuds/diana_hawthorne
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Things would have been different and yet the same, she knows, without her.</p>
<p>Di reflects in exile.</p>
            </blockquote>





	i walked in a desert

_i walked in a desert._  
and i cried,  
‘ah, god, take me from this place!’  
a voice said, ‘it is no desert.’  
i cried, ‘well, but –  
the sand, the heat, the vacant horizon.’  
a voice said, ‘it is no desert.’

_-stephen crane_

Rain. She misses the rain. Life-giving, providing, despised when she was in climes far more humid than this. But she has always been a creature of the water, though, for a time, she rejects this identity.

She cannot bring herself to swim without remembering a girl like Melusina, the half-mermaid queen of yore.

She flees to the desert where she kicks up sand rather than a spray of water droplets, each containing its own perfect rainbow.

It is her punishment, exile, thrown out as she was with quiet disgrace.

She knows that the girls think she just ran away, but she didn’t. Of course she didn’t. She had barely enough money for the ferry, and besides – Miss Nievan would have written to her mother, though she would not care.

No, she was sent away, packed on board the ferry, smuggled out of the country to save the school from prosecution. By the time Fiamma’s father made it to Stanley Island she had been en route to Egypt.

There is very little she is trained for, in the end. She manages to fool her mother (is it fooling if she cares not at all?) into giving her an allowance more than sufficient to outfit her in the finest, if unorthodox, clothes, to live as she pleases.

She goes away, away, away. Joins an archaeological excavation, figuring the hard work and the heat are the precise opposites of her life on Stanley Island. Nothing, here, will remind her of them, nothing at all.

But they discover a murdered body on the dig and when she expels the contents of her stomach in that close, dark tomb, they take it as a sign of feminine weakness.

Weakness, certainly, but nothing feminine about it.

She’s changed since she left, become bitter, hard. She smoked her first cigarette that day (and there is only ever _one_ day, no matter how many pass) and has always found herself reaching for another.

She smokes only Craven ‘A’s, and sucks the smoke in as she was taught.

She has finally learned not to cough at the taste, and she leaves a trail of burned cigarette butts everywhere she goes. 

 

There’s a lot she still desires, for in the desert there is nothing to do _but_ desire... and survive, of course, but she expends very little energy on that. She doesn’t want to survive any longer, but she seems to thrive in this climate, so far removed from her native soil.

She still wants her, still, always. There’s a peculiarity in this desire, a perversity. It remains long after any hopeful exorcism, after she has scrubbed her soul with sand and purified herself with fire.

The desert removes all impurities, though it seems not to work with her. The impurities run too deep, they are present in the very marrow of her bones.

 

She was _beautiful!_ she cries in her heart, always, always, always. _Beautiful_. Dark haired and pale-skinned, with a solitary constellation of freckles on the back of her left shoulder blade, shaped like a star. Graceful, with the delicate, musical movement of a dancer – in the water, at least. On land, clumsy as Fuzzie.

Which was her downfall. Pursuit had made her nervous, tripped her up.

_Then there was a star danced, and under that I was born_. Her words, shamelessly pilfered in her high-handed manner from Shakespeare, the one time they had been close enough to exchange confidences.

And it was true, she finds out later, when her last breath hovers above her parted lips.

Her star fell.

They used to be told that they must follow their star wherever it led, and she had – both of them had.

Was it their fault that their fates were bound up so inextricably in each other?

 

_Look, now we together must endure_  
bits and pieces, like they were the whole.  
It’s hard to help you.

They stone her because she was _wrong_ , serene in her beauty, untouchable. Because they couldn’t believe – _she_ couldn’t believe – what had been done to her.

She had shattered their lives, her life, exposed the cracks in her too-delicate façade. Ruined them.

Things would have been different and yet the same, she knows, without her.

 

She wakes up drowning.

Not in water, there is no water to spare in the desert, and indeed her water ration has dwindled in the past days. Drowning in memories.

There is the taste of rain in the air, and she sees things with a double vision. The rolling dunes of sand become the ripples of her dives in the lake, and the wind, though hot, blows cold enough to raise goose pimples along her arms.

She shivers perpetually, longing for wool jumpers and Poppy’s warmth beside her. At night she presses her palms to her left side and looks down, expecting Poppy to be there as she always had been.

She hadn’t even had a chance to say goodbye.

But there is a small, deep _P_ etched into her skin, a reminder, always, of what she’s lost.

The other doesn’t need to be written. It’s carved deep in her heart.

 

_Whither shall I wander?_

Her fingers play perpetually over the sand-worn, sun-bleached pages of the site’s atlas, travelling up and down in the blink of an eye the red-stained east coast of Africa.

_Nyasaland, Rhodesia, Tanganyika, Zanzibar, Bechuanaland._

The names echo in her mind, unfamiliar rhythms clumsy on her tongue. She could leave, she could leave _now_ , and go.

But it’s still the desert. Wherever she goes, she is in the desert.

 

Perhaps Egypt was not the right idea. Here, in the land where the dead are buried but never forgotten, always, always preserved, she finds herself remembering things she wishes to forget. Her own guilt is embalmed and anointed – the evil never leaves her.

But there’s nowhere else to go.

Even if the dead, her dead, remain with her always she can put up a good show of burying them in the dark recesses of winding tombs, of pyramids, or simply the open desert, where there are no landmarks but the stars.

And even the stars move, shift, change.

But the dead are always there.

**Author's Note:**

> The poem used in the text of the fic is from Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus.


End file.
